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Tag: FCC

A Pew Internet and American Life poll out this week finds: “By a 53%-41% margin, Americans say they do not believe that the spread of affordable broadband should be a major government priority.” Non-Internet users are less likely than Internet users to say the government should prioritize spreading access to high-speed connections.

The federal government spent $7.2 billion in “stimulus” money on the premise that the federal government is supposed to do this kind of thing. And the Federal Communications Commission’s “National Broadband Plan” is premised on the idea that there is supposed to be a national broadband plan. It isn’t, and there’s not.

Much as I love using the Internet for work, entertainment, and social connection, I recognize that people can live perfectly happy lives without it. The invention and growth of the Internet should always be seen as having opened new avenues for people, not as having created a national communications medium in which participation is required to live a full life. Social engineers, stand down: people will use the Internet if they want it, and they won’t if they don’t.

Today, we celebrate a free speech victory in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York. In the case of Fox Television v. Federal Communications Commission, the three-judge panel struck down the FCC’s indecency policy for being “unconstitutionally vague” and “creating a chilling effect that goes far beyond the fleeting expletives issue” (e.g., stray f-bombs) that was at the heart of this case.

It should go without saying that free speech is a bedrock principle of our nation. Unfortunately, it must indeed be said – over and over again – to the FCC and other governmental agencies who wish to quash speech for whatever purported and often arbitrary reasons. It’s absurd to think that the foundation of the republic is so fragile that the American people must be protected from the random scatological references of Nicole Richie.

Congrats to Bob and the many lawyers on the case for their hard-fought victory today, and we wish them luck in their continuing fights for freedom of speech.

Last week, I referred obscurely to “folks wanting to install the FCC as the Internet’s regulator,” cautioning that this same Federal Communications Commission is our national censor.

A friendly correspondent points me to an article in Ars Technica about the demand for speech controls coming from the same groups that want the FCC to control the Internet’s infrastructure, groups such as Free Press, the Media Access Project, and Common Cause.

Is there a parry to the charge that this is a demand for censorship? The signatories to the regulatory filing “respectfully request[] that the FCC … inquire into the extent and effects of hate speech in media, and explore possible non-regulatory ways to counteract its negative impacts.”

The filing does not contain the words “First Amendment” or “free speech.” It means “non-regulatory” the way a cop eyeballing someone and slapping his palm with a billy club is “non-regulatory.”

The FCC is experienced with “non-regulatory” coercion. Hearings in Congress have explored how the agency uses arm-twisting to get what it wants outside of formal regulatory processes. As law professor Lars Noah testified in 1999:

Arm twisting refers to an agency’s use of threats either to impose a sanction or withhold a benefit in hopes of encouraging nominally voluntary compliance with a request that the agency could not impose directly on a regulated entity. This informal method of regulation often saddles parties with more onerous regulatory burdens than Congress had authorized, accompanied by a diminished opportunity to pursue judicial challenges.

An FCC with the power to regulate Internet access services would use it to control Internet content. There’s no place for the FCC in monitoring or administering speech controls, nor in controlling our communications infrastructure, the Internet.

Amid charge and countercharge about who is shilling for whom in the debate over Internet regulation, Peter Suderman has the right focus in a short piece on Reason’s Hit & Run blog. The Federal Communications Commission’s Chairman is claiming that he only wants to regulate the Internet’s infrastructure, but one of his colleagues, Commissioner Michael Copps, is non-denying that he wants to censor the Internet.

There may be exceptions, but it’s usually pretty safe to assume that anytime a politician or bureaucrat dodges a question while calling for “a national discussion about” the proposal at hand, what he or she really means is, “I want to indicate that I support this idea without actually going on record as supporting it.”

The FCC does censorship. It’s unfortunate to see willful disregard of this by the folks wanting to install the FCC as the Internet’s regulator.

The New York Times starts its commentary on proposed Internet regulations with a clever ad hominem argument: “The Republican attack on the Federal Communications Commission’s proposal to classify broadband Internet access as a telecommunications service sounded a lot like the G.O.P. talking points on health care reform.”

The GOP are being like themselves. Accordingly, Times readers should think their viewpoint is yucky. It’s not the most substantive argument you’ll come across today.

There are good reasons not to encumber the Internet with regulations designed for the telephone system. Here are four: The Internet is not like the telephone system, and the FCC doesn’t have the institutional ability to manage a changing, competitive system of networks. Extending “universal service” telephone taxes to the Internet will drive down adoption and frustrate universal service goals. The FCC is subject to capture by the very interests from which the Times thinks regulation would “protect.” The Internet’s large cadre of technologists and active consumers will do a better job than the FCC of protecting consumers’ interests.

But ad hominem is more fun. So let’s ask why the New York Times didn’t disclose that, as a content provider, it has a dog in the fight? Net neutrality regulation would act as a subsidy to content providers like the Times, ultimately paid by consumers as higher prices for Internet access.

A few weeks ago, the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected the FCC’s claim of authority to regulate Internet service. That was good news—and it sure didn’t create a crisis. It meant that the FCC would have to get authority from Congress if it wanted to regulate the Internet.

But a little hiccup in that plan quickly emerged: Congress won’t let the FCC regulate the Internet. Bills to do that have been floating around Capitol Hill for years, and they’ve never gotten traction.

So the proponents of government-controlled Internet access services have worked up an end-run around Congress: They want the FCC to try to reclassify Internet access from an unregulated “information service” to a “telecommunications service,” subject to common carrier regulation, like the monopoly phone system used to be (… and still is, generations after the monopoly ended).

In the wake of today’s ruling in the D.C. Circuit that the FCC had exceeded its authority in attempting to regulate access to the Internet, I did a number of radio interviews and a radio debate with Derek Turner of Free Press, a leading advocate of Internet regulation.

The debate was a brief, fair exchange of views. I was struck, though, to hear Turner refer to the situation as a “crisis.” Sure enough, in a Free Press release, Turner says three times that the ruling creates a “crisis.”

Recall that in 2007 Comcast degraded the service it provided to a tiny group of customers using a bandwidth-hogging protocol called BitTorrent. Recall also that before the FCC acted, Comcast had stopped doing this, relenting to customer complaints, negative attention in news stories, and such.

In the wake of the D.C. Circuit ruling and the crisis it has created, Internet users can expect the following changes to their Internet service: None.

Wow. With crises like these, who needs tranquility?

“As a result of this decision, the FCC has virtually no power to stop Comcast from blocking Web sites,” the release intones.

That would be worrisome, though still not quite a crisis—except that Comcast would be undercutting its own business by doing that. Did you know also that no federal regulation bars people from burning their furniture in the backyard? That’s the same kind of problem.

As Tim Lee points out in his paper, “The Durable Internet,” consumer pressures are likely in almost all cases to rein in undesirable ISP practices. Computer scientist Lee presents examples of how ownership of communications platforms does not imply control. If an ISP persists in maintaining a harmful practice contrary to consumer demand—and consumers can’t express their desires by switching to another service—we can talk then. The focus should be on increasing competition by freeing up spectrum and removing regulatory barriers.

In the meantime, this “crisis” has me slightly drowsy and eager to go outside and enjoy the spring sunshine.